final paper - reactions

Well, the final paper’s complete. I enjoyed it, especially the chance to re-read Giles Slade’s “Made to Break: Technology and Obsolescence in America”. I enjoyed the book the first read-through, and skimmed it this second time. It was fun to write about this subject, particularly because it pertains to me and will pertain to future generations in America such as my children. I am worried about the future of America’s technological trash, as I have personally experienced the waste that people have after their technology becomes obsolete. Even though these computer parts we use are still very usable and above average as far as performance, they are thrown away as they are not “the latest and greatest”. This raised several questions as to how we can fix these future problems.

advantages of websites

In class, we were asked to talk about the advantages of specific websites. There were a few different options, one being finance. I immediately thought of one thing that had helped me on multiple occasions when this was discussed – Bank of America’s online banking functions. I do not know of other banks with the same functions as I only have one bank account, but they might. Bank of America’s online banking allows you to check your transaction history, current balance, and make transactions to other accounts. The most helpful part, however, of their functions are the Bank of America smartphone applications. These applications use the GPS features in most new applications to tell the bank where you are and notify you of the nearest ATM locations. It also tells you your transaction history and balance. Bank of America has applications for iOS, Android and WebOS. It has made my life easier.

writing the final

I am in the midst of the final paper, a few pages in so far. I'm not having much difficulty writing, as it is a pretty interesting topic to begin with. I especially enjoyed writing about the history of planned obsolescence, as Slade paints a pretty vivid picture of its history, with dozens of examples to choose from to put in the paper. I chose the Gillette example because it really shows the core of the idea of planned obsolescence – that people are willing to pay more for cheaper equipment if it gives them further convenience in their daily lives. There is also a lot of different research supporting both points in the paper, allowing me to easily pick and choose what I should write and quote. I don’t think I’ll have much problem finishing the final draft before the deadline, though it was stupid of me to wait as long as I did to finally put my thoughts to paper. So it goes.

Writing the final: before

I have been meaning to get around to the writing of my final paper blog posts...but I've fallen behind on them during the heat of finals. No worries, as I've been doing my research for the paper. I chose to write on the topic about Giles Slade's Made to Break: Technology and Obsolescence in America. I enjoyed this book, but more importantly, I hated the other option for the final paper, Neil Postman's Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology. For the most part, I simply did not agree with the author’s viewpoint, nor did I like the way he went about his arguments. He is, as he defined, a “Technophobe”. I’m excited to put my outline into words and see this paper take shape.

The Facebook Effect Pt. 3 - Analysis

The third and final section of David Kirkpatrick's "The Facebook Effect" begins just like the other two. Mark Zuckerberg's Facebook is now growing into a very important social network worldwide, and gathering the investments and interest of many large companies, including both Microsoft and Google. Microsoft already had a U.S-only banner advertising deal for Facebook's Photos application, and wanted to both renegotiate the terms of their current deal as well as take the advertising sponsorship worldwide, as over half of Facebook's quickly growing userbase was from outside the United States. They succeed with this deal, even though there were talks between Facebook and Google as well.

This was largely due to Facebook's incredibly quickly-growing API and application platform. As Kirkpatrick writes, "Facebook application companies are doing so well that their estimated aggregate revenue in 2009 was roughly the same amount as Facebook's itself — slightly over $500 million" (pg 232).

Today, Facebook is one of, if not the most important company on the Internet. A few other come to mind, such as Microsoft or Google — but it is likely Facebook with the most opportunity to usurp Google as the world’s Internet gatekeeper, the first place nearly every Web citizen goes when they first browse the Internet. It’s intelligent platform-growing deals also allow other websites to tap into Facebook’s revolutionary social graph – and while those sites may use Facebook to gain and keep users, but it is really Facebook’s future they are cementing.


-kth

The Facebook Effect pt 2

The second required reading of David Kirkpatrick’s “The Facebook Effect” was as interesting as the first. I was very excited to be reading about something I have direct knowledge of using, just as I did with “The World and Wikipedia”. Finally, reading something I knew about and enjoyed. The second part of the book picks up where the first left off, with the story of Mark Zuckerberg’s somewhat sketchy creation and first years of the Facebook. It speaks of Accel’s investments in Facebook as well as the work of Kevin Efrusy, who made the deal happen. They then recieved more money to add new and exciting features to the burgeouning platform, such as the new (in?)famous News Feed. They even began work on an API for 3rd-party developers. With all of this, Facebook grew tremendously and now commands an incredible mindshare over the developed world at large. Currently, every respectable business of a certain size owns and operates a Facebook profile, regardless of their trade. Social networking, once considered a gimmick by web analysts, is now at the forefront of everyones Internet and many consider Facebook to be the only real contender to Google as the world’s gateway to the internet. This is truly incredible for a company that began its roots just 6 years ago at the time of this writing. From 1 to 500 million+ users, the Facebook is one of the most important companies, both on the Web and in the entire world.

Wikipedia Midterm Analysis

I’ll start out bluntly - I do not think Wikipedia should be used as a scholarly source in academia, and I think that the presentations we were shown in class proved that without a doubt. Every presenter’s general closing statement, as well as our own, said that Wikipedia was generally full of good general or scientific information, but any “hard-to-cite”, controversial, or opinion-oriented information was subject to pretty significant bias in Wikipedia Articles. Our article had fantastic scientific information, but once it reached the “ethical issues” of cloning, it was full of statements that needed citation. It was also missing some important historical information.

I think that Wikipedia’s credibility can only grow. People will rely on it even more in the coming future for their main or only source of information on important topics - and they already do it a lot. This can be either very good or very bad. On one hand, this could mean a lack of credibility in many important sources and papers, or Wikipedia vandalism showing up in important documents. On the other hand, this might instead force Wikipedia to get better, and better cite and read its sources. As Metcalfe’s Law states, “the value of a telecommunications network is proportional to the square of the number of connected users of the system.” (Wikipedia: Metcalfe’s_law) Wikipedia’s future gains in users will only create a better Wikipedia for everyone else.

I learned not to trust Wikipedia as much as I thought I could. The constant enforcing of Wikipedia as a “bad” source by authority figures such as professors almost made me want to “root” for Wikipedia, and give it more credit than it deserves. After this midterm, I have come to appreciate that Wikipedia is an incredible project and resource, and even more than that, an incredible display of the world’s humanity. One day, I’ll be able to use it in my dissertation.

final third of "Made to Break" - comments

Giles Slade’s “Made to Break: Technology and obsolescence in America” remains one of my favorite books this year. It is well-written, and talks about the history and future of manufacturing products designed with a defined lifetime in mind, which is a break from the past. One hundred years ago, products were made to last as long as possible - it was a “lifetime guarantee” that was also a selling point for that manufacturer’s product. However, this all changed with the advent of the 21st century. Henry Ford’s Model T was the last car of a dying era of cars that could run for 50 years without a hitch. GM made cars with slightly changed interior materials, external body shapes, or external paint jobs every year - in an effort to make you want “the new hotness”. In a nutshell, it was a fantastic success. Every industry adapted to this moneymaking model - the fashion industry, the toy industry, et cetera. In the closing third of Slade’s book, he goes even further into detail on these topics.
In the final chapter of the book, he dedicates an argument towards the behemoth of planned obsolescence - consumer cell phones. Land line phones, manufactured since halfway through the 21st century, have always been thought of in the “buy one til you die” model for most consumers. Unless it broke, land line phones generally were used forever - with some exceptions (push button phones, the advent of voice mail and caller ID). Cell phones, however, are the exact opposite. Most consumers buy a new one every 18 months to two years - regardless of how well their current phone is working. Now, as cell phones become more complex their lifetime obviously decreases, but this is a two-part problem. Phones don’t last very long, and consumers are killing them off before their already short lifetime is up. “In the United States, cell phones built to last five years are now retired after only eighteen months of use.” (Slade 261) This is definitely a problem, but with technology for cell phones evolving at such a rapid pace (and there certainly isn’t a plateau in sight), there appears to be no way to “fix” it.



-kth

Made To Break - An Analysis (Pt. 2)

I said it before and I'll say it again - Giles Slade's "Made To Break: Technology and obsolescence in America" is a very interesting book. Slade has a writing style that can be interesting, entertaining, and even humorous at times. His social commentary on technological obsolescence is engaging in the second third of his book, even more so than in the beginning. It is a continued history of planned obsolescence, particularly in America. The second third of the book begins with the story of the radio, beginning in the early 1930s. I was interested in this story because it tied into my Media Systems and Processes class from last semester, with Prof. Steve Miller. We learned all about the story of David Sarnoff and the early NBC and CBS rivalries. In the second chapter of this reading, Slade offers more examples of different product's use of planned obsolescence as their saving grace - my favorite example being DuPont's nylon stockings, which implemented textured and patterned stockings to allow for yearly fashion changes.

Essentially, the takeaway from this story is that any producer of goods, no matter if they want to or not, must effectively use planned obsolescence to stay in the collective noosphere of their consumers - if they don't, they will be ousted by their competitors that do. An example of this is Henry Ford, who did not want to make any of his creations obsolete, but was forced to due to pressure from General Motors. This is something that has existed throughout human history, became significantly more common throughout the 1900s, and will continue to increase today and into the future.

Nearly everything has a planned date of obsolescence - one example of this is the Google Android smartphones available on the market today. The promised ideals of the open-sourced Android operating system allowed phones of all different hardware to have a fast, attractive, up-to-date system. However, critics of the OS have cited its "fragmentation" - that is, the hardware makers' slowness to update to the latest available version of Google's Android source code. Why do the hardware makers do this, when they know the users likely want the most up-to-date system available? Because they are afraid you won't buy a new phone in two years if your old one still runs the newest software perfectly fine. They have a point, but it is not good for the consumers.

Unfortunately, this doesn't appear to be changing any time soon.

Made to Break: Pt.1 of 3

I really enjoyed the first third of Giles Slade’s Made To Break: Technology and Obsolescence in America. The first half mostly consists of a few examples of the history and coming of technological obsolescence in America. Typically I don’t much enjoy the history portions of the books we have read for this class so far - I prefer reading about modern day examples, they are somewhat easier to relate to. This, however, was a bit different. I thought it read very easily and was quite interesting; I particularly enjoyed the stories of the first disposable products and the competition between Ford Motor Company and General Motors. Henry Ford prided himself for his cars’ durability, saying “We want the man who buys one of our cars never to have to buy another.” As Slade writes, “He was adamant in his determination to provide America car buyers with more than fair value, and they responded with enormous brand loyalty.” (Slade 32) Though this was admirable, it was Alfred Sloan of GM’s use of obsolescence and style marketed towards women that made their cars tremendously more popular than Fords’. While Ford continued to innovate in safety aspects, GM’s style eventually forced Ford to switch to a model of planned upgrades to a car’s aesthetics every year to three years.
This type of obsolescence continues today, and is pervasive in near-any product the average American customer buys every day. It is still true of cars, as well as every electronic, from laptops to headphones. Also true is the idea of different classes first introduced by Sloan in GM cars - when your electronic dies, you are likely to want to “upgrade” to a better model than your last. I’m sure I’ll learn more about more modern examples, which I am excited for; Slade’s style of writing lends itself to easy, fun reading.

Current Event solo presentation - an analysis

This past week, I was up to speak in front of the class for my solo current event presentation. Mine was on Ross Rubin of Engadget’s editiorial “Switched On: Why the digital hub died”. (http://www.engadget.com/2010/09/11/switched-on-why-the-digital-hub-died/) In a nutshell, it takes an look back on the 2000 Macworld Expo, where Steve Jobs gave a presentation about his vision for the future of Apple Computers. During this speech, he mentions important partners like the Rio MP3 player and Palm V, which, ironically, were eventually beaten in the market by Apple’s iPod and iPhone, respectively. He also spoke of the PC as a “digital hub”, or as a main storage space for your mobile devices to connect. This is an interesting speech because it is not the way the market has gone, instead flocking to the cloud as a “hub” for your information. Apple has become a mobile devices company, with more of their revenue coming from iPods, iPads and iPhones than Macintosh devices. One of the lines from this article that express its arguments best follows: “The recent Apple TV reboot clearly demonstrates the shift away from PC-centricity to cloud-centricity. At its introduction, Apple TV was an iTunes peripheral, much like the iPod. It synced with a computer (albeit over a network connection as opposed to a USB cable), which was responsible for procuring or managing the media. In its latest iteration, though, AppleTV has moved from the iTunes ecosystem to the iOS ecosystem of mobile devices. While it can still stream media from a PC, it doesn't require one, and its video acquisition model is based on rental so as to be free from the rigors of managing storage.” (Rubin). I brought these facts up to the class, along with one from the Did You Know series of videos, saying that the mobile device will be the primary Internet connection for the world by 2020. (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ILQrUrEWe8&feature=player_embedded) I asked the class - is the PC dead? Only three or four students expressed that they still owned a desktop computer, with many using laptops. Of the ones who did, they said it was business supplied; another mentioned their next computer wouldn’t be tied to a desktop. I then asked, what comes after the laptop? Is the smartphone the new laptop, if the laptop is the new desktop? Will we one day see the death of the laptop and the move to iPads and phones as our main computers and all of our information in the cloud? Google’s Chrome OS is counting on such a future. It only remains to be seen when that will happen.

Wikipedia Analysis pt 2

This week we were supposed to read the second half of Andrew Dalby’s “The World and Wikipedia: How we are editing reality”. The second half of the book picks up where the first left off - it’s very interesting to read. I think it’s a break away from the norm for me to be reading such current texts - too much Shakespeare during high school, perhaps. That said, the second half of the book is a bit more interesting than the first. In the beginning, he talks briefly about the history of the idea and etymology of the first encyclopedias, as well as their successors into the current Wikipedia and its competitors. The most talked about of these competitors is the Encyclopædia Britannica. It is one of the world’s largest and currently the world’s most respected scholarly English encyclopedia. It is throughout the book talked about as if it is already dead, a staple of an era gone by. In many ways, this is true. The model of full-time, paid editors and scholarly contributors can not keep up with the quantity of writing the collaborative Wiki software can amass. However, this model has a few major flaws. The idea that anyone can edit or create new articles allows for new contributions to be made incredibly quickly, which lets Wikipedia become a fairly reputable news source. However, it also means that it can easily become susceptible to vandalism. While Wikipedia has some efforts in place to curb vandalism, some will always fall through the cracks. As Dalby writes, “Vandalism could be quite largely prevented by insisting that users register before editing. but that’s an extremely bad idea because great numbers of useful edits of all kinds, including the first reports of many major events, come from users who can’t log in, don’t want to, don’t dare to, or think they haven’t time.” This leaves Wikipedia at an impasse. This is largely the reason why Wikipedia is typically not respected by academia as a scholarly resource. However, this will eventually change. Wikipedia is gaining more respect every day, and will eventually kill all of its competitors. It is at that time that Wikipedia will be used in universities and studies.

Wikipedia: Analysis pt. 1

This week's assigned reading was on Andrew Dalby's "The World and Wikipedia: How we are editing reality". I have to say, this is my favorite book assigned this semester. It offers a brief history of encyclopedias as well as both the negative and positive aspects of using Wikipedia. One point of interest he wrote about was Wikipedia's Neutral Point of View guidelines, which indicate that articles should be written without bias. Of course, it is quite difficult to do this for any human. Dalby managed to write objectively throughout the book thus far, which I thought was interesting. I would have expected a lot of fanfare for the positive aspects of Wikipedia; Dalby wrote extensively and provided many examples regarding the dissenters of Wikipedia. He speaks of the story of John Seigenthaler, whose Wikipedia article’s biography included mention of his suspected involvement in the Kennedy assassinations, which was thoroughly false. Wikipedia’s administrators chose to disallow anonymous creation of articles after that particular event, though it kept anonymous editing of created articles. One aspect I found particularly interesting was that Reference.com and Answers.com downloaded Wikipedia’s data and showed it as their own, making it much more difficult for Seigenthaler to remove the false statements about himself from their databases. Dalby writes: “The two mirror sites, Reference.com and Answers.com, were much harder for Seigenthaler to deal with. Their pages could not be edited. They went on displaying the offensive text for some weeks, until the next Wikipedia download arrived.” (Dalby 59) This shows that even in its infancy, with rumors flying of its legitimacy, other websites were created devoted only to mimicking Wikipedia.
The book thus far contrasts interestingly with Postman’s Technopoly, last week’s reading. Dalby writes with a much more objective touch to his writing, allowing himself to see both the negatives and positives of Wikipedia. Postman, on the other hand, is a true and proven Technophobe. He fears the embracing of technology our culture has shown, and wishes for it to stop.
This book broadens my knowledge on the impact of Wikipedia on our culture, and the ramifications of having generally correct information at our fingertips, 24/7. I expect for this to be touched on more in the second half of the book, but I am interested to err away from the history of Wikipedia and predict the future and how it will create it for us.

Technopoly: An Analysis (pt. 2)

The beginning of the second half of “Technopoly” begins just like the first; there are insults to public wisdom disguised among wordy sentences. He starts out the back 9 of the book with the following passage: “That American Technopoly has now embraced the computer in the same hurried and mindless way it embraced medical technology is undeniable, was perhaps inevitable. And is certainly most unfortunate”. For a humanist, Postman really doesn’t seem to have much faith in the average American citizen to make an informed decision about technology. To him, we must all appear to be wide-eyed patrons of Las Vegas every time we enter Best Buy – too preoccupied with blinking lights to worry about any implications of our purchases.

The same vibe continues from the beginning of the book. Postman writes with a holier-than-thou attitude, speaking with disdain when discussing the benefits of any technology or the average person, but speaking a bit more excitably when discussing the detriments of technology on a culture or when providing examples to pad his argument. Unfortunately, I’m not buying it. It simply is not becoming of someone to argue so feverishly against technology, without allowing any acceptance of its benefits, then to continue to think of oneself as fair and unbiased on the subject of such arguments. Postman is a “Technophobe”, through and through.

It is even more obvious when compared to Swedin and Ferro’s “Computers . . . “ As I discussed in my last post, they write very happily about their subjects, almost seeming sated just to be caught up in the history and future of technology – Postman, on the other hand, seems like he’d be happier if we lived in the Stone Age. It is quite obvious I don’t like the author of this book, nor the way he discusses his subjects. However, I do appreciate one aspect of the novel – its excessive use of interesting (though not always valid) examples to “support” his points. Though Postman surely puts his own spin on them, they serve as interesting little stories to break up the otherwise monotony of the book.


-kevin

Technopoly: An Analysis

Neil Postman starts the beginning of one chapter in "Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology” with “Technopoly is a state of culture. It is also a state of mind. It consists in the deification of technology, which means that the culture seeks its authorization in technology, finds its satisfactions in technology, and takes its orders from technology. This requires the development of a new kind of social order, and of necessity leads to the rapid dissolution of much that is associated with traditional beliefs.” (Postman 71) This is the basis of Postman’s arguments throughout the beginning of the book.

Thought it appears a bit wordy at first, the book is an interesting read. Postman starts the book off by buttering himself up a bit, whilst talking about Technophiles, …one-eyed prophets who see only what new technologies can do and are incapable of imagining what they will undo.” (Postman 5) He asserts that the majority of the public these days are Technophiles. Opposing the Technophiles are the Technophobes, with averse opinions. Though Postman makes very clear the vast problems with being a Technophile, he makes quite clear that he is in no way one of them. Instead, he believes he is in between, a middling mind whose wisdom allows him to see both sides of the argument. Though he makes some good arguments throughout the paper and obviously knows the subject matter, I feel a bit more humility would have been less distasteful. I came off not wanting to listen to what he had to say, regardless of its truth. Nonetheless, the book is required reading, so I trekked onward. Throughout the book he makes continual reference to the story of Thamus the King and Theuth the inventor; in Postman’s analogy Theuth is the Technophile and he himself is the King. See what I mean about humility? The King has the wisdom to be able to see the repercussions, both positive and negative, of many of Theuth’s inventions, the most touched upon being the written language.

I found the differences between “Technopoly” and Eric Swedin and David Ferro’s “Computers: The Life Story of a Technology” to be very interesting; not the subject matter, but the way the authors made clear their feelings for the technology they were writing about through their words. Postman spoke with almost a disdain for the technology he was writing about, as well as the American people. I was not surprised to see that he was 61 at the time of the writing of “Technopoly” and often considered a Luddite by many of his critics. Swedin and Ferro, on the other hand, spoke with an almost fervor for the computers they wrote of. It was almost a rush to read “Computers . . . ”, as it was written with such ardor.

Though I appear to be ripping into this novel thus far, it has made some interesting and thought-provoking points. Hopefully the second half does more of that.

The second half of Computers picks up a bit quicker than the first. By this point in time, we’re into the days of the IBM giant and microprocessors, and desktop PCs are a new invention. Many different companies are picking up IBM’s technologies and copying them, birthing multi-billion dollar companies like Compaq, Dell and others. This point in technological history is a bit of a scattered rush, as so many different things are happening at once. Primarily, though, the Apple II and the relationship between Microsoft and IBM are some of the most influential parts of this time period.


The Xerox PARC team, and later the Apple team invent the modern graphical user interface, abandoning the cryptic command-line interface of BASIC and MS-DOS. It was also around this time that software became its own business, with “killer apps” like VisiCalc and Microsoft Word becoming valued pieces of business technology. As Ferro states: “In 1970, total sales of software by U.S. software firms was less than half a billion dollars. By 1980, U.S. software sales reached $2 billion.” (pg. 102)
Video games spawned another huge industry within the technological fields, Microsoft birthed many millionaires, the Internet and World Wide Web were created. Over around 20 years, the shape of the world and the world’s communications were completely altered forever.


There is truly no way to easily summarize the way that the introductions of all these technologies changed our world. Computers went from being building sized to pocketable, and while becoming exponentially more powerful. Much of the world’s information is never less than a second and a Google away. And, as Ferro puts it, “a reader fifty years from now will look back on the computers and software available at the turn of the millennium and be astonished at how primitive it all is.” (pg. 149)

TFLN

The other night, my girlfriend (taracugs) and myself went to the TFLN extra credit seminar. I was excited - free credit and we get to see something actually interesting for once? It couldn't be better.



Unfortunately, that was not the case. As was discussed in class, the creators were exceedingly boring hipsters. Ben was mildly funny, attempting to engage the audience, while Lauren literally sat there and made a bad joke every once in a while. They seemed both apathetic towards their appearance as well as unsure as to what to say. When Lauren read the TFLN (extremely slowly, by the way), they lost all humor. She even managed to insult New Jersey at its state university.

While I don't want to say it was all bad, it really was. I assumed they would have an interesting story as to the creation of TFLN, but it was actually just inside jokes that they paid some guy to make a website for. It truly proves that anyone can get rich.


-kevin

Critical Analysis: Computers - The Life Story of Technology (pgs. 1-83)

The beginning of Computers starts off a bit slow, introducing the entire concept of mathematical theories throughout mankind. From cavemen to the Romans to modern day, Ferro speaks of the different, independent number systems developed through the course of history. As it progresses, however, the book becomes far more interesting. Ferro mentions a few of the different mechanical means of applying mathematics invented in the 17th and 18th century. Eventually, he brings up Charles Babbage, which is where the book starts turning away from the fundamental mathematical concepts behind computers and towards the development of what will eventually become the modern-day computer. Until his time, “computers” literally were people who computed numbers. However, Babbage sought to eliminate as much human intervention from the mathematical process as possible. The Analytical Engine is a prime example of this. It is, in many ways, an abstract blueprint for the computer as we know it throughout the 20th century and today. In Ferro’s words, it “is considered the first realizable design for a general-purpose computer.” (pg. 17)

As the book enters the time period of the second World War, computing technology picks up at an infinitely faster rate. IBM becomes the largest player in this newly fleshed out field, going from a “punchcard” company to a digital one. It is during this time that the “second generation” of computer hardware is being created. The second generation, of course, is characterized by the invention of the transistor. It was, according to Ferro, instrumental in “rapidly replacing vacuum tubes in computers . . . because transistors were much smaller, generated less heat, and were more reliable.” (pg. 52) Two important “inventions” are discussed in this section, those being the introduction of software programming languages (FORTRAN and COBOL being the main players) and the idea of the Turing Test to test assess artificial intelligence.

The first half of the book finishes by discussing Jack Kilby and the invention of the semiconductor microprocessor. Room and building-sized computers were not as were reaching the end of their lives as Kilby sought to alleviate their bulk. Similarly, it became impossible to add more transistors to chips, as “The limits of making electronics by hand became apparent”. (Ferro 66) He introduced and patented the idea of thousands of transistors on a single piece of silicon, and simultaneously birthed the modern-day (3rd-generation) computer.

I have noticed that many of my classes this semester are introducing many of the same concepts. I’m learning the history of electronics (The Electronic Century, Nebeker - 01:512:395), fundamentals of computer and programming concepts, and many other alike ideas at once. I’d consider this to be an advantage, because it amounts to many overlapping concepts (which possibly correlates to less overall study time :D). It also is interesting because it allows me to look at one idea (such as, perhaps, the introduction of transistors) from many angles. The rise of computers and computing technology changed society and communication forever, on both the micro and macro level. For example, airlines were able to use computers and punchcards to significantly streamline their efficiency while simultaneously adding thousands more customers. The US Census saved money and time on an exponential scale thanks to developing computer technologies. Thanks to companies like Fairchild Semiconductor and IBM, America became the center of this developing realm of technology, and with it became a larger world superpower.

-kevin

Introductions/Tech logs...

So here's my blog. I might be writing it because I have to, but that doesn't mean I can't enjoy it, right? Maybe it'll become my new thing. People will say, "oh, that's Kevin! He's that blogger!". Or something.

Anyway, I logged my web browsing habits over the weekend. Here's the sites I visited:

Reddit.com+subdomans;Facebook.com; Lifehacker.com; Engadget.com; Waffles.fm; 2dopeboyz.com; Wired.com; Qwantz.com; Nedroid.com; *.rutgers.edu

Lifehacker, Engadget, 2DopeBoyz, and Wired are all sites I visit once or twice a day just to check up on things (or in the case of 2DB, download music). Qwantz (Dinosaur Comics) and the Nedroid Picture Diary are my somewhat embarrassing secret favorite webcomic sites. Despite what my girlfriend thinks, I love the antics of both T-Rex and Reginald.

Waffles I visit once or twice a day just to keep up to date on my statistics - I probably shouldn't talk about it much on an academic blog, but you can Google for more information. Rutgers.edu site are generally from Sakai and eCollege, and once-in-a-while checking on myRutgers.

Facebook and reddit are the big ones. Of course, everyone visits Facebook nearly constantly - I am no different. I'd wager about 15 unique visits a day, perhaps branching off into other Facebook links from there.

Reddit is my other kryptonite. I'll likely open nearly 100 links per day from reddit and its various "subreddits" (I'm particularly a fan of /r/Android, /r/geek, /r/funny, and /r/slackerrecipes). I would definitely say I spend at least an hour total on the site every day. It's getting bad.

-kevin hoagland